It's scary. I had CCD two years in a row, then year 3 I had foulbrood and had to destroy all my hives. Now my orchard is in full bloom, but there's hardly a bee working it. This sucks ass.

The strings would not look like this if filmed with a CCD with a universal shutter. This effect is from the rolling shutter in almost all modern CMOS-based camera sensors.

It's sort of an illusion, but not due to the optics of the camera, rather the temporal effect of the sensors.

They stay that way in all proceeding pictures? Or just the long exposure ones?

I would assume the latter, cosmic rays slow down and lose quite a bit of their energy by the time they hit us down here on the ground....exposure to one in space though will certainly kill a pixel for good.

Saturation of light sensitive photodiodes (ill call them PD's henceforth) (essentially what the CCD is PACKED with) causes damage over time. You can just over-saturate the PD, to the point of damage (usually around 3dBm above its rated saturation point), and it will bounce back ok. The sensitivity of the pixel will be harmed dependant on the time and the level above saturation it was exposed at.

You can see a similar phenomenon in video footage of nuclear reactor survey footage from drones, or....stupid people that are way too close....where the reactors have a nasty event.

Charlie I get those on my CCD on Earth. The trick is that I expose my camera for usually 10 minutes at a time (under the stars.) Even so, only 1 out of 50 gets a good solid cosmic ray hit.

Interesting info:
The colourful dots you see all over the shot at the start as he is talking, are pixels in the CCD of the camera that have been hit by radiation from space!

The pixels have been exposed to energetic particles with such intensity that they no longer see a gradient between light and dark, its all light....the pixel has been 'saturated' to the point of damage.

The detail is best seen in full screen @720p. You wont see them in the lower-resolution streams.

Thanks that is awesome. The future looks bright for nighttime imaging. CMOS sensors are going to pass CCD some day I bet.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by Barseps.

>> ^Longswd:

Strap a CCD to his melon and you've got a pretty cheap steadycam.


Cheap? What do you feed your cat?

Strap a CCD to his melon and you've got a pretty cheap steadycam.

2012 KT42 is an asteroid discovered by Alex R. Gibbs of the Mt. Lemmon Survey (part of the Catalina Sky Survey) with a 1.5-m reflector + CCD on May 28, 2012. The asteroid had a close approach to the Earth on May 29, 2012, approaching to only Distance: ~8950 miles / ~14,440 km above the planet's surface. This means 2012 KT42 came inside the Clarke Belt of geosynchronous satellites. As of May 28, 2012, the estimated 5 to 10 meter wide asteroid ranked #6 on the top 20 list of closest-approaches to Earth. There was no danger of a collision during the close approach. 2012 KT42 will pass roughly 0.01 AU (1,500,000 km; 930,000 mi) from Venus on 2012 July 8.[3]

It is estimated that an impact would produce an upper atmosphere air burst equivalent to 11 kt TNT,[4] roughly equal to Hiroshima's Little Boy. The asteroid would be vaporized as these small impacts occur approximately once per year. A comparable-sized object caused the Sutter's Mill meteorite in California on 2012 April 22. It was removed from the Sentry Risk Table on 2012 May 30.[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_KT42

I'm quite sure those rings are the exact kinds of artifacts you can get when observing. I've seen a few messing about with CCD's. They're always that same ring shape.

>> ^Yogi:

It's Eyes...They're drilling a HOLE into my SOUL!


Actually, he was just counting the individual elements in the CCD of the camera.

I sure hope Kodak can survive now. If they drop dead I want to know who is going to make the really nice astronomical CCD sensors.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by taranimator.

>> ^deathcow:

there are some weird non-wind visual effects going on in this movie
most noticeably at 0:58


I think that's just the CCD trying to compensate on zoom.